Treatment of oily wastewaters by highly porous whisker-constructed ceramic membranes: Separation performance and fouling models

Efficient treatment of challenging oily emulsion wastewater can alleviate water pollution to provide more chances for water reuse and resource recovery. Despite their promising application potential, conventional porous ceramic membranes have challenging bottleneck issues such as high cost and insufficient permeance. This study presents a new strategy for highly efficient treatment of not only synthetic but real oily emulsions via unexpensive whisker-constructed ceramic membranes, exhibiting exceptional permeance and less energy input. Compared with common ceramic membranes, such lower-cost mullite membranes with a novel whiskerconstructed structure show higher porosity and water permeance, and better surface oleophobicity in water. Treatment performance such as permeate flux and oil rejection was explored for the oily emulsions with different properties under key operating parameters. Furthermore, classical Hermia models were used to reveal membrane fouling mechanism to well understand the microscopic interactions between emulsion droplets and membrane interface. Even for real acidic oily wastewater, such membranes also exhibit high permeance and less energy consumption, outperforming most state-of-the-art ceramic membranes. This work provides a new structure concept of highly permeably whisker-constructed porous ceramic membranes that can efficiently enable more water separation applications.

Automated summary

This study presents a new strategy for highly efficient treatment of both synthetic and real oily emulsions using inexpensive whisker-constructed ceramic membranes. These membranes show exceptional permeance, low energy input, and better oleophobicity in water. The study explores different operating parameters and uses classical Hermia models to understand the fouling mechanism between emulsion droplets and the membrane interface. The membranes also perform well in treating real acidic oily wastewater, outperforming most state-of-the-art ceramic membranes. This work introduces a new structure concept for highly permeable whisker-constructed porous ceramic membranes that can enable more efficient water separation applications.